engage your own Intelligence before the Judge does?
Here Come the Judge!!…
If you are the leader everybody assumes has it handled, and you are quietly exhausted by a bar you set … for yourself, this week is for you. And the soundtrack of a leader who achieved stratospheric success… and lived through it… barely…
Everyone is writing about AI… artificial Intelligence this year. This week is about the other kind. The human kind. The kind that decides whether you walk into Monday leading, or just surviving…
Everybody has The Judge. It grades the meeting before you have left the room. It replays the tape at 2 in the morning. It finds the one thing that went wrong in a day full of things that went fine, and it sounds exactly like you, so you believe it.
…and nobody came to listen until he was 27
33 years ago today, August and Everything After came out. T Bone Burnett produced it. Saturday Night Live came in January 1994, and the album “jumped 40 spots a week for five or six weeks.” It peaked at No. 4 and went 7 times Platinum. The Rolling Stone cover followed. “All of a sudden, I got mobbed. I was uncomfortable at the time. You know, it’s like waking up on Mars. Your anonymity is f—ing gone.”
Adam Duritz was born in Baltimore in 1964, a doctors’ son who left Berkeley without finishing. He played in The Himalayans and Sordid Humor, and he waited. “I was 27 before anyone from any record company came to see any band I was in, and it wasn’t Counting Crows.”
The trouble started before the fame did. In the HBO documentary Have You Seen Me Lately? he goes back to 21. “I would be afraid to open my eyes in the morning. I just really wanted it to be over.” He stopped using drugs that year because his mental health did not mix with them, and he names the hardest line in the film without flinching. “The worst part about cutting yourself is you do it and it works.”
If any of this sounds close to home, please call or text 988 in the US.
Round Here, the Judge speaks first…
Round Here is track 1 on that record, and it is older than the band, it started in The Himalayans. As a single in 1994 it reached No. 7 on Modern Rock. On VH1 Storytellers Adam described its character this way: “the more he begins to leave people behind in his life, the more he feels like he’s leaving himself behind.”
That is the Judge’s favorite trick. It does not yell. It keeps you so busy achieving that you stop noticing who you left behind, starting with yourself.
Adam did not name what he lives with, a dissociative disorder, until 2008. “I didn’t want to be a public spectacle.” Most of the leaders I sit with are not hiding a diagnosis. They are hiding exhaustion. Different weight. Same instinct: keep it quiet, keep performing, and let the voice run the meeting.
…so engage it every night
The first thing Positive Intelligence taught me was not to argue with The Judge. Arguing is a trap, it is a better debater than you are… even me 😉… AND… it has all your files. The move is to catch it, name it, and give it less to work with.
I found out what it looks like when Intelligence is not engaged the hard way. I was weeding, tired, headphones up too loud, moving too slowly to notice anything. A large diamond shape went past my left foot, followed by a rattle I counted at 12 segments. “Now I am for sure NOT in my rational brain!” is the line I typed that same night, and it still is. What came after was a very stiff drink, another soothing mechanism that quiets the Judge, just not the one Positive Intelligence actually teaches.
Right now I am working with several leaders who are running hard on pressure they put on themselves. Every one of them can tell me, in detail, what went wrong this week. We engage the other side of the ledger… on purpose… EVERY night. End the day with 6 things that go OK… for every “aw sh…”… Not great. Just ok. Ok is the point. The Judge can argue with great all day. It has a much harder time with ok.
Do it every day and, in my experience, it reprograms your brain to steer away from the negative. Nobody announces it. You just notice, two weeks in, that the 2 a.m. tape is shorter.
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: this Monday night, before you close the laptop, write down 6 things that went ok today, for every 1 thing that went wrong. Every day this week. When The Judge tells you it is silly, that is how you know it is working.
Helping leaders quiet The Judge and get back to the work they love is most of what I do now. Schedule time with me here.
See you soon – Round Here
